Critical Mass Melee Wizard

[RazeBarb]

Tried the shocknado variation and really liked it. Killing speed is amazing with it, uploaded pieces of my a3 run:

That is ****ing insane, Sir. If I really need to sacrifice HP and some DPS to farm like that, I'm gonna do it.

Edit: Your spamming Nova, Crystal Shell and EB all at once without giving one of them a higher priority, right?

[Tombat]

Hi,

Im using for the last week the same build than moreno and can confirm that it rocks. Ive been playing CM/Tornado wizzs for a couple of months now and, in my oppinion, this is the following logical step to take after the 1.4 changes. With the monsters nerf, you can go without EA using SA instead, taking some more care, but it is 100% viable with some decent gear (not ultimate, just decent). Wellcome to the shocking aspect age.

It took me a couple of weeks to tune my char starting from the pure Shocknado (no frost nova) to find myself playing like in the video. I use all the same skills but in the right mouse, I swich between teleport, force armor and arcane destruction archon dependin how I feel. The last one is what I am enjoying the most since brings much more flexibility in the offensive/strategic way and is by far much more fun to have because it is very usefull in some uncomfortable fights (hey, u may have to fly away and come back at some point, but at the end you always have to go and kill something, skipers go home!! )), although teleport still is the best in the safety side...in the long run.

I want to share with you something Ive found around the shocking aspect, so I will go fast through my stats:

28k life
35k DPS no buffs
4.8K armor no buffs
650-750 all resits (no buffed , no primatic)
2.09 atacks per second
620 LoH
40,5% crit %
190% crit damage

anything atonishing as you can see, but my old 1.3 WW/CM build had still no LOH, 1.75 atack per second, less life and less DPS and still cleared out everything in the game. So you will have to get someway better/different to move from pure Frost/CM/SC build to here. In a simple way, prismatic armor saves you gold, but is less challenging, less fun and when you get used to this, less effective. This build with the 1.4 ultimate gear would be something...dont know, uh. You rich people make it and show us .

Straight the point:

-I have found atacking with just shocking aspect, this is standing and casting tornados, no EB, no nova, no absorb armor (ouch!) kills much more faster than standing and spaming explosions, freezing stuff (with cold blood and nova rune is 35% more damage to frozen mosters!) and all the like. how is this possible?
If the mosters you are facing allows you to do that, the output damage increases every second (the life bar in mosters drops faster as time goes by). This aspect is easy to check with Azmodan, I can tank him just casting tornados without nova no prismatic armor, standing on top of the dark power, and hes gone faster than spamming nova, EB and armor.

All this leads me to think that shocking aspect does PROCS, and this is what I would like some people here test as well. I moved from 1.7 atack/sec to 2.09 and this is very noticiable. If you cast tornado, it crits, it triggers aspect, the triggered aspect can LoH, and crit again and then starts a new roll of everything without casting a new tornado. As chances to trigger consecutive aspects are dimishing, the reaction stops in a given time. But if you have chance to crit and atack speed on gear enough so you can start a new rolls with a consecutive tornados before what explained above is gone, as each of these trigger new rolls, every second you are dealing more and more damage, like a nuclear reaction: if you pass the threshold point, the released energy increases every second.

At the end, in order to exploit this, you need to feed the system with as many tornados as you can to keep it over the threshold point. For this reason, if you spam nova, EB and armor, its animations decreases the amount of tornados output, and the reaction stays under control :((

Good think is that you only can abuse of this vs certains mosters, so you still need nova and all the spam in many situations. Ghom for instance, as he always moves a bit to the sides and it is not that easy to target (dont understand why, being so fat), tanking without nova (to keep him a bit more quiet) and without armor, if you miss a couple of tornados hits and no LoH for a bit, the gas kills you in half second.

At the end we will have a char that can use different strategies and its very fun to play. Trying to drive the mosters to a situation where you can abuse of SA for few seconds, with a finger always ready to frost and other to cast armor is very exciting. This makes the game much more enjoyable , because the risk has its backwards. And I recomend you to give a try to arcane destruction archon, not to use every fight, but vs fast runners/dodgers that cannot be properly locked with nova, run by their side, fast nova-freeze (+35% damge) and quick arcane destruction explotion -omg^^- run away, rinse and repeat hehe, so fun. I hate those Ocultists fat goats in arreats crater so much.

All this is my theory and needs to be proved, since I havent found SA procs coefficients in any list of the forums around this, I do not have anythithing to support it. But it works in that way, thats for sure, although could be the explanation may be different, the fun is granted.


And sorry for my english and gramma, I hope you can live with it .

Tomb

[MrNajsman]

That is ****ing insane, Sir. If I really need to sacrifice HP and some DPS to farm like that, I'm gonna do it.

Edit: Your spamming Nova, Crystal Shell and EB all at once without giving one of them a higher priority, right?

Im note sure if it works for every keyboard layout but if you have those three on the keyboard and energy twister on the mouse you can just keep them pressed. As long as you spam twister they will cast as soon as theyre up again.

[Eric Xanthu]

I have definitely noticed that killing speed goes up as fights go on with the shocking aspect...but I just assumed that was more a function of getting the tornadoes out than shocking aspect itself procing. If you're right though, then it shouldn't matter if you are spamming EB and Diamond Skin. Those don't use swing animation, so there is no conflict with Storm Chaser. You just have to give up Frost Nova.

I'm still not convinced it's procing. That would absolutely require a nerf.

[CFourty]

Here's what I've settled on so far:

- Energy Twister - Storm Chaser
- Slow time - Stretch time
- Frost Nova - Bone Chill
- Explosive blast - chain reaction
- Diamond skin - crystal shell
- Energy armor - prismatic
-- Critical mass
-- Evocation
-- Cold blood

The extra attack speed from slow time is nice. I chose this over the extra damage option because I play in groups most of the time and giving everyone the attack speed is still a nice damage increase while speeding everything up for me. I didn't really see a need to keep Teleport or a defensive skill, so I played around with options and liked stretch time, especially playing in groups because the bonus applies to allies also. I might have to try this shock armor stuff, when I was testing the only armor changes I did were prismatic vs force.

[Eric Xanthu]

I tried getting something out of Stretch Time when 1.04 first came out and didn't have a ton of luck...but I was solo and I missed the Teleport a lot. For group play you might be right, except that my allies are so DPS loaded that there really aren't any places where Slow Time is helpful. Maybe for bosses? So if your group is still gearing toward that A-A+ level gear, or Barb-heavy (I run with an Arcane Orb wiz and a DH), then you might get something out of Stretch.

I'd like to be wrong, because I love the concept of Slow Time.

[gratmaster]

@ magicrectangle

can you upload again or elsewhere your gear please ? when I click on it , it doesn't get me anywhere nor show me picture.

thank you very much !

[gratmaster]

I tried getting something out of Stretch Time when 1.04 first came out and didn't have a ton of luck...but I was solo and I missed the Teleport a lot. For group play you might be right, except that my allies are so DPS loaded that there really aren't any places where Slow Time is helpful. Maybe for bosses? So if your group is still gearing toward that A-A+ level gear, or Barb-heavy (I run with an Arcane Orb wiz and a DH), then you might get something out of Stretch.

I'd like to be wrong, because I love the concept of Slow Time.

when I play in coop i often use slow time time warp for damage buff

[RazeBarb]

I tried a few different CM builds over the weekend, and my favourite is the CM Archon.
My favourite thing about it, is the (kinda) "Press button = win game" feeling. There's absoultely no stress/button spamming involved like with the other CM builds.

Look at my build and **** gear: http://eu.battle.net/d3/en/profile/F...8/hero/2210535

Playstyle:
Basically your plan is to be in perma-archon state. This won't really be possible until you have at least 100k+ dps and +12% movement speed. So everytime you run out of archon, you cast ET/Crystal shell until Archon is ready again and drop those million crits (if you got arcane destruction).

Right now I'm at 60k dps (after buffs) but my gear really lacks in every aspect.
You should get to 1200 all res while in archon form and at least to 80k dps because that's when lifesteal gets better than LoH and will make you OP.

[magicrectangle]

I think shocknado is probably going to be my new default build because of trash. The "classic" build is amazing for skipping trash and killing elites, but it is too slow for killing trash. SHocknado gets trash dead a lot faster - and since we're supposed to kill trash now...